A Contrastive Study of Aspectual Means of Expression in Czech and German Narrative Texts

The thesis deals with a contrastive study of various aspectual means of expression in Czech and German. First it presents the aspectual systems in both languages as they are described in traditional models of aspectuality. Czech and German express aspectual meanings by different means. Hence a contrastive analysis of both languages is based on a mutual semantic feature of telicity, which constitutes the main semantic opposition in both studied aspectual systems. The analysis focuses on a limited group of Czech and German Incremental verbs. For the Incremental verbs it is characteristic the homomorphism, the relation between event development and manipulation of the object (constitution, termination, modification). Incremental verbs include in their direct object the thematic role of Incremental Patient. The goal of the paper is to present and describe with support of corpus data the relevant means of expression of telicity and other aspectual meanings: the telicity of a verb is determined by verbal semantics, relation between a predicate and its nominal phrase that functions as an Incremental Patient and certain semantic properties of an Incremental Patient. The analysis of aspectual means of expression concentrates on specific linguistic means in both languages. In Czech the category of verbal...